While the intonation of Romanian in the Republic of Moldova does not greatly differ from across the border in Romania’s province of Moldavia, several decades in the USSR instilled the Moldovan language with a great many Russian calques. I was quite taken aback the first time I heard someone use the exhortation daţi să… ‘let’s’, a translation of Russian давай instead of the standard Romanian hai să. Doing a little research on the topic, I came across an article by Angela Arama that is a strident call to do away with these calques and return to a more traditionally Romanian way of speaking.
In Indo-European linguistics I so often heard that the proto-language had four clearly defined seasons that I never thought that there could be other prevalent systems of natural cycles. In the collection Проблемы исторической лексикологии чувашского языка (Cheboksary, 1980) N. I. Yegorov contributes a paper titled ‘О названиях времен года в тюркских языках’ (The names [...]
When I was in Kyrgyzstan in June, I lost my Russian-English-Russian dictionary, Random House’s pocket dictionary that had served me well for over six years. I looked around for a new one in Bishkek, but options were few and in the end I got a cheap dictionary that evidentally had been made by a local [...]
While I have learnt some languages fairly quickly and feel that I have mastered grammar if not idiom, Russian continues to present challenges. No matter how much I speak the language (it’s sometimes my daily working language in Helsinki), how much time I spend in Russia among native speakers, and how many textbooks I work [...]
As another language blog, LanguageHat occasionally does, I’m going to write something about a poet. This is not as off-topic as it might seem. My graduate studies in Finno-Ugrian linguistics beginning later this year will be on “marin kielikontaktit” (Mari language contacts), namely Mari’s relations with neighbouring Uralic languages Mordvin and Permian, but also its [...]